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It is hardly surprising that the one-for-five prisoner swap that freed US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from his captivity in the Pakistani-Afghan border region and five high-ranking Taliban officials from the American detention facility at Guantanamo has led to another clash between President Obama and his detractors in the Congress and elsewhere. For the extreme right, as expressed on a number of web sites, the deal with the Taliban amounts to another act of “treason” on the part of what these circles have long attacked as an illegitimate president.

While the official line of Washington since the Nixon presidency has been that “we do not negotiate with terrorists,” this position has been abandoned repeatedly with the objective to free American hostages.

This was the case during the Iranian Hostage Crisis that lasted 444 days and was finally resolved through negotiations. With Algerian officials acting as go-betweens between the US and Iranian governments, the release of the American hostages was achieved in exchange for the release of large sums of Iranian assets that had been frozen in American banks since the early days of the hostage crisis.

Far more violations of the "no negotiations with terrorists" policy happened during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and H.W. Bush in the 1980s.

Although President Reagan had come to office with the warning that terrorist violence would result in swift and effective retribution, he decided otherwise, when a Hezbollah group hijacked TWA Flight 847 in 1985, killing a young US Navy diver, and eventually holding more than fifty Americans in and around Beirut. When the hostage-takers asked for the release of hundreds of Lebanese prisoners from Israeli prisons, the Reagan administration looked to Israel for working this out. With the excuse that the release of more than 700 Lebanese prisoners had already been decided, the hostage-prisoner swap was smoothly carried out.

And then there was, of course, the secret arms-for-hostages deal negotiated by Reagan’s emissaries and their Iranian counterparts that sent mostly spare parts for military equipment to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages by Hezbollah. Starting point was Hezbollah’s kidnapping of foreigners in Lebanon, among them 25 Americans. Two of those, William Buckley, CIA station chief, and William Higgins, a US Marine colonel, were brutally killed by their captors, several hostages managed to escape.

Tehran, after much delay, finally got Hezbollah to free two American hostages. But soon thereafter, two other Americans were kidnapped by the same terrorist gang.

The long Lebanon hostage crises was finally resolved on President Herbert Walker Bush’s watch, when Terry Anderson, the last American hostage, was released after Israel agreed to free Lebanese prisoners. Moreover, Hezbollah received a hefty sum of money from Iran when the Tehran government got as part of the final deal more of its frozen assets from US banks.

You would think
that the very politicians who hype the “fiscal cliff” and claim to do the
business of the people would have more pressing problems to concentrate on than
the non-issue of UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s role in what Senator McCain and his
cabal try to elevate to a Watergate-like scandal.

To be sure, the
attack on the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11th of this
year raised legitimate questions about the protection of American facilities in
Libya and other volatile areas in the region.

Those questions
are rightfully asked and must be answered as result of an ongoing State
Department investigation. UN ambassadors are not at all charged with the
security of US missions abroad.

Yet, McCain and
his allies single out Ms. Rice for her role as chosen administration
spokesperson who explained the Benghazi attack afterwards according to information
provided by the CIA.

If President
Obama nominates Rice to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Senators
threaten, they will not confirm her.

Perhaps there
are better candidates for State than Ms. Rice. But to oppose her on account of
her bit part in the post-Benghazi explanations is utter nonsense.

Explaining the
Benghazi strike as spontaneous uprising or a planned act of terrorism after the
event did not change the outcome: the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens
and three other Americans.

The death of any
American caused by senseless violence is regrettable. In her column
today, Maureen Dowd piles on when she characterizes the events in Libya as “slaughter
in Benghazi” in a piece critical of Rice.

Senators McCain
and his side-kick Lindsay Graham are staging nothing more than a farce that is
contrary to their behavior in the face of real deceit of Congress, the public,
and the international community: the role of then National Security Advisor Condoleezza
Rice in the Bush administration’s selling cooked intelligence about alleged
weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein as reason for the
Iraq War.

Senator McCain
and his colleagues did not hesitate a moment to confirm the much adored Condoleezza
Rice as Secretary of State in spite of her compliance in the big Iraq lie.

Here is the
death toll for the Iraq War: A total of 4,804 coalition troops were killed,
4,486 Americans. Many, many more were injured—physically and/or emotionally. And
then there are tens of thousands of Iraqi victims.

Mind you, Ambassador
Rice had absolutely nothing to do with the death of four Americans in Benghazi.
The same cannot be said of her namesake with respect to the high cost of the Iraq
war in human and financial terms.

The “fiscal
cliff” that according to conservatives and Wall Street types will plunge the
country’s economy and fiscal system into a deep crisis is nothing more than a
red herring.

After they
failed to buy the presidency and the majority in the U.S. Senate, the same billionaires
and corporate advocacy groups in cooperation with their GOP allies in House and Senate try now
to blackmail the reelected President Obama and Democrats in the Congress to
agree to their fiscal rescue plan.

Their old and new position is
simply this: No higher tax rates for high and highest incomes!

Yes, the
Republican leaders plead for cooperation and non-partisanship for the best of
the country.

But their idea
of cooperation means agreement to their unfair tax policies.

Last week, a
strong majority of voters rejected that GOP’s tax agenda.

According to
exit polls, 47% of voters want higher tax rates for incomes of $250,000 and
higher; an additional 13% wants across the board tax increases.

Although all the
talk is about tax increases, at risk here is the end of the tax cuts, mostly
for the rich that were adopted during George W. Bush’s presidency. Those tax
cuts—along with two costly wars—are responsible for our high budget deficits in
the last decade.

It cannot be
disastrous to return to the tax rates of the Clinton years, when the country
enjoyed an economic boom period, high employment, and a balanced federal budget—indeed,
a budget surplus.

The president
does not want a whole sale return to the Clinton tax rates but insists on
higher rates for the high and highest income strata.

That is the right
position. And the one he promised during the campaign.

On this,
President Obama cannot compromise.

Rather, as
Senator Patty Murray has suggested, going over the fiscal cliff than giving in
to GOP pressure.

If all taxes go
up this coming January because of the GOP and its super-wealthy masters, the vast
majority of Americans with low and middle incomes will rightfully blame the
protectors of the super-rich.

While President
Barack Obama won reelection and the Democrats additional seats in the U.S.
Senate, some of the Tea Party’s high profile candidates lost their races for
the Senate (Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock) and the House (Joe Walsh, Allen West).

Some observers concluded that
the election results signaled the beginning of the end for the Tea Party
movement and its political influence. According to the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee’s web
site, “The 2012
elections have been the undoing of the 2010 Tea Party tsunami that crashed upon
Washington. The Tea Party is over.”

That seems more wishful
thinking than reality based on actual election results. Borrowing from Mark
Twain I believe that reports of the Tea Party’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Beginning with Congress’s
upper chamber, the number of Tea Party endorsed U.S. Senator’s will increase
at least from four Tea Party Caucus members in the current Senate (Jerry Moran of
Kansas, Mike Lee of Utah, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, and Rand Paul of
Kentucky) by three (Ted Cruz of Texas, Jeff Flake of Arizona, and Deb Fischer
of Nebraska) for a total of seven. This is hardly a weak result for the Tea
Party movement.

Of the 60 House
members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus, six did not run for reelection,
47 were reelected, six lost their races and one race seems not decided yet.

Besides the 47
reelected Tea Party Caucus members, there will be additional GOP Representatives endorsed by some Tea Party or Tea Party-like group. For example, a
number of the “strong conservatives” endorsed by Rick Santorum’s Patriot Voices
PAC were elected to the House, among them Missouri’s Ann Wagner and Montana’s
Steve Daines.

There is no
official record of Tea Party endorsements for all candidates. The Tea Party
Express, one of a few national Tea Party organizations, officially endorsed a
number of candidates. But so did many of the local groups. But we do not have complete numbers. Nor do we have complete numbers for the total
number of Tea Party endorsed members in the current House since not all joined
the Tea Party Caucus.

All told, this is the conclusion
based on data, not on wishful thinking: The increase of Tea Party endorsed
members in the next U.S. Senate and the far from devastating decrease in the
House based on Tea Party Caucus members do not justify to declare the Tea Party
movement dead.

Thanks to his
clear victory this week President Obama has replenished political capital to
assert the same strong leadership he displayed in reaction to Hurricane Sandy.

To be sure,
Republican leaders in Congress have shown none of the qualities that New Jersey
Governor Chris Christie demonstrated when he abandoned partisan politics and
cooperated closely with the president in the face of a horrendous crisis for
the benefit of the many hard hit hurricane victims in his state.

President Obama
must nevertheless strive to install the bipartisan Obama-Christie cooperation model in Washington
in order to find agreements to solve the nation’s most pressing problems. Never mind
that Republican leaders, who might want to cooperate, will continue to feel threatened
by the wrath of uncompromising Tea Partiers and Grover Norquist, the unelected
ruler of the GOP’s no-new-tax dictate.

The president’s
stump speeches in the last phase of the campaign underscored that he is an
excellent communicator if he so chooses.

Unfortunately,
the great communicator Obama was mostly absent from the political arena for
most of his first term. Had he explained, for example, in plain language the
provisions of the “Obamacare” package, he could have enlisted solid public support.

He left it to
the opposition to fill the gap with misinformation.

This must change.
In today’s mass society with its many forms of mass communication and mass
self-communication a strong leader must constantly inform and engage the people
rallying their support for policies benefiting the vast majority and opposition
against those measures designed for the super-wealthy 1 percent.

First of all, and
before the new congress convenes, the so-called fiscal cliff must be dealt with
decisively. Unless there is finally a fair agreement on how to handle the
expiring tax cuts adopted during the George W. Bush presidency, there will be
across-the-board spending cuts in Pentagon and domestic programs.

President Obama
must insist on doing away with all of the favorable tax rates for the rich and
super-rich while preserving those for the lowest and middle income groups. He should
muster all his communicative qualities to lead a vigorous public discourse on
good and bad ways to deal with the fiscal crisis.

And he should
try to win former President Bill Clinton to be his negotiator-in-chief with
congressional leaders in the upcoming struggle to avoid going over the
financial cliff.

Earlier this
week, the New
York Times reported that the Congressional Research Service (CRS) withdrew
an economic report that “found no correlation between top tax rates and
economic growth, a central tenet of conservative economic theory, after
Senate Republicans raised concerns about the paper’s findings and wording.”

No wonder that
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell did not want the report to see the light of
day. After all, the findings of the non-partisan congressional research unit
unmasked the centerpiece of the GOP’s and presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s
economic policy as divorced from reality. Contrary to claims that lowering the
tax rates for the highest incomes allows “job creators” to give rise to a
wonderful job market, economic data of the last eight decades do not confirm
those claims. According to the withdrawn CRS report,

“Analysis of such data suggests the reduction in the
top tax rates have had little association with saving, investment, or
productivity growth. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be
associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income
distribution. The share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased
from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession.
The evidence does not suggest necessarily a relationship between tax policy
with regard to the top tax rates and the size of the economic pie, but there may
be a relationship to how the economic pie is sliced.”

In other words, while lower top tax rates will not
magically turn the super-rich into job creators, they surely will increase
their own wealth—at the expense of the rest of us.

Without the campaign promise that his policies will create 12 million new jobs, presidential candidate Romney is
like the emperor without any clothes in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale.

The problem is that in his campaign appearances Mr. Romney
continues to tell his fairy tale again and again. According to public opinion polls
about half of the electorate buys his story.

Obviously, Mitt Romney has taken flip-flopping and lying to a new art form.

Today’s Washington
Post’s editorial suggests that Romney “seems
to be betting that voters have no memories, poor arithmetic skills and a
general inability to look behind the curtain. We hope the results Tuesday prove
him wrong.“

If Romney wins next Tuesday, his fool-the-voters strategy might well
become the predominant campaign model of the future.

Nobody has set the record straight like Bill Clinton at the Democratic
National Convention. Not Barack Obama. Not Joe Biden. Not one of their
fellow-partisans on the Hill or across the country.

It took the former President not to duck but answer the question that Mitt
Romney and Paul Ryan love to ask: Is America better off today than four years
ago?

Bill Clinton jumped on the question that most Democrats don’t want
to touch. Yes, he said, America is better off than at the time when Obama was
elected and moved into the White House.

Remember? The most severe recession since the great depression! Financial
markets on the brink of collapse! Two of the three one-time great American car
manufacturers bankrupt! The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!

Clinton was right, when he said that no other president, not
Clinton himself and not any president that preceded him could have repaired the
economic and fiscal damage that Barack Obama inherited within one presidential
term.

During the campaign, Romney, Ryan, and their surrogates have praised
Bill Clinton as fiscal moderate and as the opposite of tax-and-spend lefty
Barack Obama.

Now, their model Democrat has contradicted their tales about their plans
for a glorious future for America, once they take over.

In Charlotte, Clinton made clear that he opposes such a changing of the
guards.

Now he should work hard to prevent it.

His approval ratings are significantly higher than those of all other
politicians, including the contenders in this presidential campaign.

It seems that most Americans have forgiven or forgotten Bill Clinton’s
private shortcomings. He is admired because he presided in the 1990s over an
economic boom period and left office with a budget surplus.

In Charlotte, he tried hard to come to the rescue of President Obama and
his agenda.

But Clinton’s campaigning for the Democratic ticket, whether yesterday
in North Carolina or for the rest of the campaign across the United States is not
enough.

There would be a sea change in this campaign if the
current and former president would agree on a temporary but major role for Bill
in the second Obama administration.

Clinton would hold the newly created office of what
one might call the “Economic Recovery/Fiscal Soundness Czar.” He would promise
to stay until the economic conditions have markedly improved and sensible reforms in
the tax and entitlement systems are adopted.

The promise of Bill Clinton involved in reenergizing America’s
economic engine and bringing the fiscal house in order would translate into
Obama’s and, hopefully, a bunch of Democratic congressional candidates’ victories
in November.

The good news is that Paul Ryan is not a Sarah Palin. By selecting Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as running mate, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney picked a bright guy who knows the ins and outs of domestic policies better than, if not all of his peers. Never mind that he lacks experience in foreign and defense policy. He will never match the clueless utterings of his predecessor Sarah Palin.

The bad news is that Ryan’s budget plan, embraced by the Republican Party and presidential candidate Romney, would rip to pieces the most important parts of the modest social safety net that provides some protection to senior citizens and the destitute strata. His plan would lower the already historically low tax rates for the highest income groups further at the expense of programs for the middle class and those with the lowest incomes.

The clever selling point here is that allowing the wealthier among us to keep more of their money will turn them into potent job creators and thus would allow the rest of Americans to retain or get a job, work hard, and earn enough for a good living. There would not be any need for a helping hand from government programs.

The problem is that the trickle down scheme does not work. Or, let’s say, it works well for those on top but not at all for the middle and lower classes.

President George W. Bush’s drastic tax cuts, heavily tilted in favor of the highest income groups, contributed mightily to the drastic increase of the federal budget deficit. Congressman Ryan voted for those cuts that kept also all kinds of deductions in place and made the rich richer.

Based on Internal Revenue Service data for 2009, the New York Times reported today that of the 400 individuals with the highest incomes, $202 million on average, six paid no federal income tax at all. Just as revealing, the Times reports,

“Besides the six who paid no federal income tax, the I.R.S. reported that 27 paid from zero to 10 percent of their adjusted gross incomes and another 89 paid between 10 and 15 percent, which is close to the 13.9 percent rate that Mr. Romney disclosed that he paid in 2010. (At the other end of the spectrum, 82 paid 30 to 35 percent. None paid more than 35 percent.) So more than a quarter of the people earning an average of over $200 million in 2009 paid less than 15 percent of their adjusted gross income in taxes” [emphasis added].

Congressman Ryan voted for this kind of unfairness in the tax code; he also voted for the two other major contributors to the budget deficit during the previous administration: the Medicare Part D prescription drug provision that was and remains a financial bonanza for the private insurance industry and, of course, the Iraq War.

In other words, the author of the Ryan budget plan was one of the very politicians responsible for the massive budget deficit that President George W. Bush left behind.

By heeding the Wall Street Journal’s and other Republican ideologues’ advice to pick Paul Ryan as running mate to prove his commitment to ultra-conservative doctrine, Romney became finally one of them. Romney’s has now the stamp of approval of the leading ultra-conservatives and of the conservative/libertarian base most active in the ranks of Tea Partiers.

I agree with the Journal’s editorial page that the choice of Paul Ryan as vice-presidential candidate puts two very different visions and plans of America’s future in front of the electorate.

Will it be pure individualism and capitalism or will there be some commitment to collectivism and capitalism with a human face?

“Whatever doubts Americans may have about Mr. Romney's empathy or background,” the Wall Street Journal’s opinion piece pointed out, “more of them will turn out for him if they see a leader with a vision and plan worthy of the current difficult moment.”

Of course, that “vision and plan” originated with Ryan, not Romney.

That reminds me of Mitt Romney’s Freudian slip this morning. He introduced Paul Ryan as the “next president” of the United States before returning to the pulpit and correcting his error.

For the Obama campaign, Romney's selection of Ryan and his policies is an opportunity to highlight and debate the dramatic contrast between the two campaigns' visions and what each of them would mean for the future of the vast majority of Americans.

The news media and social networks blew up one sentence spoken by one political strategist into a major political controversy and handed the Romney campaign a convenient weapon to intensify their attacks on liberals and especially President Obama as the real enemies of mothers and wives and daughters in the “war on women” in America.

What happened? Hilary Rosen, a Democrat, political strategist and analyst for CNN, commented during a CNN program on the fact that Mitt Romney cannot connect with women, is clueless as to women’s concerns, and has of late told audiences that his wife Ann is better at articulating his real concern for women’s well-being.

Rosen’s statement was this: “His wife has actually never worked a day in her life,” she said. “She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids? How do we send them to school? And why we worry about their future.”

What is so offensive here? For starters, cable TV, other media outlets, and social media honed in on the first sentence, “His wife has actually never worked a day in her life.” That is a wonderful sound bite for media that strives on conflicts and clashes. In most instances, the rest of the “explosive” remark was omitted and thereby the whole context of the discussion.

There was no need for the president, his wife, former first lady Barbara Bush, Ann Romney, the Romney campaign and supporters to defend stay-home moms as women with the most heavy and difficult workloads. The real issue here is whether women with the extraordinary financial means as enjoyed by Ann Romney have any idea about the struggles of ordinary women with modest or low incomes. Rosen’s criticism was not at all targeting all mothers who make the choice to stay home and raise their children. But it reminded us that many women do not have a choice, even if they would love to stay home, they need to work to put food on the table.

If a candidate defers publicly to his wife as the expert on women’s issues, especially economic ones, why would it be wrong to point out that Mrs. Romney, given the family’s wealth and plush life style, is as detached from average women (and men) as is her husband?

This morning, I saw a clip of Ann Romney’s response on FOX News. “I can tell you and promise you that I have had struggles in my life." Promise us? I am sure that Mrs. Romney like all mothers had her struggles with five active sons around. I am sure that she had and has her struggles with her illness. But she did not have the economic struggles and worries of so many mothers (and fathers) about the daily necessities of life, food, housing, health insurance, the education of their children.

In short, this is once again a case of much ado about nothing, media feeding frenzy and political opportunism at a time when the nation is faced with real and urgent domestic and foreign policy issues.

The other day, Cjrystia Freeland of Reuters wrote, “With hindsight, we may find that the 2016 U.S. presidential race began last week, when Hillary Rodham Clinton made a politically electrifying point. ‘Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me,’ she said at the Women in the World conference in New York. ‘But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women.‘” Actually, the Secretary of State made another important point. “It is hard to believe that even here at home, we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us, because America needs to set an example for the entire world,” she said.

Albert Hunt of Bloomberg News predicted earlier,” On Nov. 7, the day after the presidential election, she will be the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic nomination, regardless of who wins the presidency this time or whether she plans to run."

Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times, addressed the idea of Hillary Clinton replacing Joe Biden as President Obama’s running-mate in this fall’s campaign. “It’s time to take it seriously,” he wrote and gave three specific reasons for the Hillary as candidate for the vice presidency: “One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016.

Like others with less prominent media platforms Keller envisioned Biden to replace Clinton as secretary of state.

But Maureen Dowd is convinced that such a switch--however compelling--is “not on the radar screen at the White House” because Hillary Clinton would not “be able to navigate past two powerful men who would find her elevation problematic: Obama and Biden.”

When the first “Hillary for vice president” suggestions surfaced in the blogosphere, I dismissed them as pipe dreams. But the prospect of having any of the remaining GOP candidates duping enough independent voters and moderate Republicans (if there are any left) to score a victory over President Obama in November has changed my view.